George Crump

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Triple mirroring, or Replication Factor 3 (RF3), presents hidden challenges when evaluating VMware alternatives and hyperconverged architectures. Although RF3 enhances data resiliency beyond single drive or node failures, many organizations face unexpected costs, operational complexity, and scalability constraints, which are pronounced in smaller or larger deployments, where resource efficiency and manageability become critical issues. These unexpected triple mirroring challenges force most IT professionals to avoid the technology completely, but with the right design, a triple mirror can provide better availability at a lower cost.

The Basics of Triple Mirroring

Triple mirroring replicates data across three separate nodes or storage devices. This approach ensures data availability even if two nodes, or drives with those nodes, fail simultaneously, providing a higher degree of redundancy and resilience compared to dual replication (RF2). On the surface, this redundancy sounds ideal for critical workloads, but deeper examination reveals several substantial drawbacks.

Costly and Impractical for Small Environments

One major limitation of triple mirroring is its inefficiency in smaller environments. RF3 configurations require a minimum of five nodes to maintain adequate redundancy and quorum, even though the storage and computing demands may not necessitate this level of investment. For small data centers or departmental deployments, this requirement results in a prohibitively high entry cost, as the infrastructure must be oversized to achieve adequate redundancy.

Triple Mirroring requires five nodes

In these scenarios, the high infrastructure cost, coupled with a reduced usable storage capacity—approximately a 66% reduction compared to single-copy storage—can be problematic, as it inflates the total cost of ownership without providing proportional operational value.

Scalability Challenges for Large Deployments

At the opposite end of the spectrum, large-scale deployments find triple mirroring delivers diminishing returns. In environments spanning dozens or more nodes, the risk of multiple simultaneous failures increases. For instance, protecting against dual node failures in a 32-node cluster may prove insufficient, as larger clusters inherently present greater statistical risks. Consequently, the likelihood of multiple concurrent failures can quickly exceed what RF3 is designed to handle. Moreover, even if an organization was willing to implement a higher redundancy level, such as “quad-mirroring,” available solutions do not offer this capability.

As environments scale, the inefficiency of triple mirroring grows exponentially. It requires a substantial upfront investment in storage and computing capacity to maintain adequate redundancy across all nodes. These demands escalate infrastructure complexity, increasing management overhead and resource consumption.

The Hidden Costs of Triple Mirroring

Triple mirroring introduces hidden long-term costs that extend beyond maintaining a third copy of data. First, the third data copy requires deployment on identical, production-class servers and storage media, as triple mirroring technologies cannot dedicate specific nodes solely for data storage without also utilizing them for compute tasks.

Secondly, the significant expense associated with triple mirroring forces IT teams into complex trade-offs, as they manage multiple storage volumes with varying resiliency levels, with some set at RF2 and others at RF3. This dual-resiliency model increases complexity and compels IT to prioritize specific applications, granting them higher availability while relegating less critical applications to lower protection levels. Additionally, many solutions employing RF3 lack the flexibility to revert seamlessly from RF3 to RF2 or upgrade from RF2 to RF3 without requiring a complete recovery of VM data from backup, which adds further operational burdens, limits flexibility, and increases the risk of downtime.

A More Efficient Alternative with VergeIO ioGuardian

A far more efficient and powerful solution is VergeIO’s ioGuardian technology, which delivers the resiliency advantages of triple mirroring without the associated overhead and complexity. ioGuardian maintains an independent, deduplicated third copy of data on a single, cost-effective storage server, reducing storage overhead and increasing resiliency beyond two node failures.

Triple mirroring on a secondary server that extends beyond the capabilities of a triple mirror.

For smaller environments, ioGuardian offers an optimal approach by requiring only one additional, affordable storage server, eliminating the need for multiple fully provisioned nodes. In larger environments, ioGuardian provides extensive protection against numerous simultaneous node failures by delivering a robust, real-time, and accessible backup repository that is independent of the primary operational infrastructure. With ioGuardian, organizations no longer need to selectively allocate protection levels, ensuring comprehensive availability for all applications.

Simplified Management and Lower Costs with ioGuardian

VergeIO’s ioGuardian simplifies infrastructure management, reduces complexity, and lowers costs. Its dedicated storage server approach minimizes resource consumption, as the server focuses solely on secure data storage and recovery, rather than hosting active virtual workloads. Furthermore, ioGuardian’s global inline deduplication dramatically reduces storage capacity requirements, directly decreasing both capital and operational expenses.

How ioGuardian Works

By decoupling redundancy from operational nodes and centralizing it into ioGuardian’s dedicated backup repository, organizations achieve superior data resiliency. In scenarios involving multiple simultaneous node or drive failures—situations that even exceed the protections provided by RF3—ioGuardian immediately ensures continuous data availability through real-time redirection of requests. When production nodes detect missing or unavailable data blocks due to hardware failures, VergeOS transparently redirects these requests to redundant data blocks stored within the independent ioGuardian server, enabling uninterrupted application performance and seamless user access.

Eliminate Triple Mirroring. Backup and Data Availability in one simple solution.

Critically, ioGuardian maintains operational efficiency by deferring data migration back into primary production nodes until failed drives or nodes are physically replaced or explicitly marked for replacement. When the drives are replaced, ioGuardian automatically repopulates data onto the repaired or newly replaced hardware, minimizing unnecessary data movement and preserving the performance of the production infrastructure.

Additionally, ioGuardian serves as a comprehensive traditional backup solution. It enables organizations to restore virtual machines, individual files, or specific data versions directly from their repository when needed, providing reliable access to historical data snapshots. This capability simplifies recovery processes following data corruption events, accidental deletions, or ransomware attacks, thereby enhancing overall data integrity and reducing costs further.

Conclusion: Rethinking Triple Mirroring with VergeIO

While triple mirroring initially appears straightforward for ensuring data availability and redundancy, its hidden complexities, high costs, and scalability limitations often overshadow its intended benefits. Modern IT infrastructures demand more flexible, efficient, and scalable redundancy solutions. VergeIO’s ioGuardian offers organizations—from small departmental setups to large enterprise clusters—a simplified, robust, and cost-effective approach to data protection, surpassing traditional triple-mirroring strategies. Data redundancy is one aspect of a VMware Alternative’s capabilities that IT should consider. They should look for solutions that encompass all aspects of data availability as part of their selection process.

To explore these advantages further, join our upcoming live webinar, Comparing HCI Architecture.

Filed Under: Protection Tagged With: , ,

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Comparing VMware Alternative Storage

As part of a VMware exit, comparing the VMware alternative storage capabilities is as important as selecting an alternative hypervisor for the organization’s future infrastructure software. Organizations typically examine Nutanix’s Controller Virtual Machine (CVM) architecture against VergeIO’s integrated VergeFS storage within VergeOS. Although both approaches virtualize SAN functionality onto the same servers, creating a virtual SAN (vSAN), the two designs differ. These differences impact resource utilization, operational complexity, stability, and costs.

Understanding vSAN Resource Efficiency

Nutanix employs a storage-as-a-VM architecture using a dedicated CVM running on each node. This CVM consumes substantial resources—between 16GB and 32GB of RAM or more, alongside multiple virtual CPUs (up to 22 vCPUs per node). This significant resource footprint reduces available capacity for production workloads, driving higher infrastructure costs and decreasing resource efficiency, particularly in smaller environments.

VergeIO integrates storage directly into VergeOS via its VergeFS file system, eliminating the need for dedicated controller VMs. This integration ensures more node resources remain available for production workloads, improving resource efficiency without requiring additional hardware investments.

Sizing and Stability of vSAN Alternatives

Sizing complexities are inherent in Nutanix’s CVM-based model. Determining the ideal CVM size is critical yet challenging. Undersized CVMs lead to bottlenecks or instability, while oversized CVMs consume unnecessary resources. Nutanix users sometimes experience stability issues such as random CVM reboots, leading to a reactive response rather than root-cause analysis from support teams.

VergeIO’s integrated storage approach within the OS kernel eliminates these sizing complexities, providing predictable and stable performance without the risk of bottlenecks or instability. This inherent stability reduces operational overhead, making VergeIO a reliable VMware alternative with minimal administrative intervention.

Understanding vSAN: Performance

Comparing VMware Alternative Storage

When under load or insufficiently resourced, Nutanix’s CVMs negatively impact VM performance on the same node, leading to broader performance degradation across the cluster. VergeIO’s integrated approach ensures stable and consistent resource utilization, avoiding disruptions and translating directly into improved cluster reliability and responsiveness.

VergeIO consistently publishes detailed performance benchmarks, demonstrating VergeOS’s real-world capabilities. Nutanix, in contrast, has provided minimal transparency regarding vSAN performance. While no benchmark perfectly represents every customer scenario, VergeIO’s results offer valuable insights.

Recent VergeOS performance benchmarks show impressive outcomes, including over 1.5 million read IOPS, 23 GB/s throughput on a 25 GB/s network, and realistic 64k block sizes at less than one penny per IOPS. Independent testing by StorageReview demonstrated VergeOS handling 1,000 virtual desktops booting in 71 seconds. These benchmarks substantiate VergeIO’s superior performance and transparency claims compared to Nutanix.

Management and Troubleshooting a VMware Alternative

Nutanix’s separate CVM introduces additional management complexity, requiring administrators to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot an extra software layer. Issues such as CVM reboots or resource contention complicate troubleshooting, increasing operational burdens.

By removing the separate CVM layer, VergeOS simplifies operations. Administrators gain straightforward monitoring, simplified diagnostics, and faster issue resolution, all integrated transparently within VergeOS.

Understanding vSAN Controller Resiliency

A key consideration when comparing the VMware alternative storage capabilities is how the solution handles resiliency. Nutanix promotes its distributed “leader” CVM architecture, allowing any node to assume cluster leadership. However, this approach offers limited practical advantage, as additional leader nodes beyond simultaneous node failure tolerance are redundant. Nutanix clusters configured with RF3 can survive two simultaneous node failures, reducing the practical value of additional leaders.

VergeIO’s ioGuardian provides redundancy and resilience beyond traditional N+2 redundancy. While conventional three-way mirroring (N+2) continuously replicates data across three nodes, ioGuardian enhances protection by maintaining an independent, deduplicated third copy, stored separately from the primary mirrored dataset. This highly available backup replaces traditional backups and becomes integral to your continuous availability strategy.

IoGuardian seamlessly and transparently serves data back to the production environment in real time during multi-node or multi-drive failures, even exceeding two nodes. Affected virtual machines instantly retrieve the necessary data from the ioGuardian storage, eliminating downtime and ensuring uninterrupted operations without manual intervention or complex recovery workflows.

Combining immediate real-time data availability, reduced infrastructure overhead, and simplified management, ioGuardian substantially surpasses the protection and operational simplicity achievable with standard N+2 redundancy approaches.

How a vSAN Impacts TCO

Nutanix’s CVMs impact total cost of ownership (TCO) beyond licensing. They require substantial resources, necessitating larger hardware configurations, increasing capital expenditures, and increasing ongoing licensing expenses.

In contrast, VergeIO’s integrated VergeFS reduces the software footprint, simplifies licensing with straightforward per-server pricing, and optimizes existing or commodity hardware. This approach considerably lowers infrastructure costs, positioning VergeIO as a cost-effective VMware alternative storage solution.

Summary of VergeOS Advantages

Comparing VMware alternative storage capabilities reveals that VergeIO’s integration of VergeFS into VergeOS provides significant practical advantages over Nutanix’s CVM-based storage model. It maximizes resource efficiency, ensures consistent and reliable performance, simplifies management, and reduces infrastructure and licensing costs. These combined advantages position VergeIO as an attractive VMware alternative storage solution, ideal for organizations seeking efficiency, stability, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness.

To further explore VMware alternative data availability and see these considerations in action, join our upcoming VergeIO webinar. Our experts will provide an in-depth comparison of hyperconverged and ultraconverged architectures, highlighting performance benchmarks, operational simplicity, and cost-efficiency. Register now to ensure your infrastructure decisions align with your organization’s strategic priorities.

Our latest white paper, “HCI Data Availability Analysis,” delves into the crucial issue of maintaining availability in Hyperconverged and Ultraconverged architectures by comparing how Nutanix and VergeIO ensure data access during hardware failures.

Filed Under: HCI Tagged With: , ,

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Improving IT operational performance should be a key criterion when selecting a VMware alternative. Yes, lowering licensing fees and improving hardware performance will factor into the decision. Still, the project’s long-term success will depend on whether the new infrastructure software helps raise the IT operational bar so IT can be significantly more responsive and efficient after the switch.

Improving IT operational performance

In today’s highly competitive IT landscape, internal IT teams are increasingly benchmarked against Managed Service Providers (MSPs). MSPs, in turn, face comparisons against Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), and CSPs against hyperscale cloud providers. This competitive environment highlights operational performance as the crucial differentiator. Infrastructure software’s effectiveness and IT skills determine an organization’s ability to deliver superior operational outcomes and gain a competitive edge.

Shifting from Raw Performance to Operational Efficiency

Raw performance once dominated IT discussions, driving infrastructure investments to achieve incremental gains. However, as processing power has become plentiful and high-speed NVMe flash storage has become more cost-effective, businesses face diminishing returns on investment from raw hardware upgrades alone. The real competitive differentiator now lies in operational capabilities and efficient utilization of the hardware investment enabled by choosing the right infrastructure software:

  • Enhanced Observability: The ability to proactively monitor and manage infrastructure health in real-time.
  • Rapid Deployment: Quickly and reliably deploying new workloads or scaling into new locations.
  • Extended Hardware Lifecycles: Safely and reliably leveraging existing hardware resources over a longer period, aiming for hardware lifespans of up to a decade.

Why Operational Performance Matters

Improving IT operational performance directly impacts agility, reliability, and cost efficiency. Organizations excelling in these areas will outperform competitors, reduce unnecessary costs, and respond swiftly to market demands. Rather than merely upgrading hardware, IT departments must now prioritize improving operational workflows and infrastructure visibility and selecting infrastructure software that aligns with these strategic goals.

Raising the Operational Efficiency Bar

VergeOS is designed to help organizations exceed operational performance expectations, offering robust capabilities beyond those found in conventional solutions like VMware. Here’s how VergeOS achieves this:

Improving IT operational performance

Unmatched Observability

Through its ioMetrics integration, VergeOS provides comprehensive, real-time infrastructure monitoring. IT teams leverage tools like Prometheus and Grafana to gain detailed visibility into system performance, proactively identifying and resolving issues before they impact business operations.

Accelerated Workload Deployment

Improving IT operational performance can also be achieved through seamless integration with infrastructure-as-code (IaC) platforms like Terraform. With its native Terraform provider, VergeOS enables rapid and predictable deployment of new workloads or locations. Organizations can automate infrastructure deployment and configuration, significantly reducing manual errors and operational overhead.

Raising the Operational Efficiency of Hardware

Improving IT operational performance includes enhancing the efficiency of the IT hardware assets. You are being asked to do more with less, so should your hardware. VergeOS ensures hardware resources are utilized to their full potential without compromising critical capabilities. It supports many virtual machines per node and maximizes storage capacity per node, enabling IT teams to leverage their infrastructure fully. Additionally, VergeOS provides unmatched node flexibility, incorporating compute-only, GPU-only, or storage-only nodes, seamlessly integrating these diverse resources into a cohesive, holistic group. This level of flexibility and efficiency enables organizations to tailor their infrastructure precisely to their operational needs, optimizing resource allocation and minimizing waste.

Improving IT operational performance

Extending Hardware Life

Unlike traditional hypervisor environments, VergeOS’s architecture efficiently utilizes hardware resources, extending its functional lifespan. By maximizing hardware usage in a safe, resilient manner, organizations can confidently stretch hardware cycles closer to a decade, substantially improving ROI.

Operational Efficiency Requires Quality Technical Support

A critical component of operational performance is the quality of technical support that the VMware alternative vendor provides. No matter how robust the infrastructure software is, exceptional support is essential when issues arise. VergeIO’s technical support consistently receives high praise from customers:

“The responsiveness and knowledge of VergeIO’s support team are second to none. They quickly resolve any issues, minimizing downtime and maintaining our operational continuity.” — Eric Miller, Manager of Information Services, Lancaster Central School District

“We genuinely feel like VergeIO’s support team is an extension of our own IT department. Their proactive approach has significantly improved our infrastructure reliability.” — Kelley Allen, CEO of CCSI

Don’t take our word for it—explore detailed experiences and case studies by visiting our case studies page.

When Raw Performance Matters

While improving IT operational performance has become the critical differentiator in most scenarios, there are specific situations where raw performance remains essential. In these cases, it is crucial to ensure your infrastructure software fully extracts the potential from your hardware, something VergeOS has consistently demonstrated leadership in achieving, yet our competitors have been suspiciously quiet about.

VergeOS has delivered impressive performance benchmarks, including:

  • Launching 1,000 virtual machines in just 70 seconds.
  • Achieving over 1 million IOPS with 23 GB/s throughput using real-world workloads.
  • Maintaining sub-millisecond latency for critical applications, even under intense workloads.

As organizations begin deploying private AI workloads, raw performance and near-bare-metal efficiency will undoubtedly rise in importance. However, even in AI-centric deployments, improving IT operational performance by ensuring ease of deployment, robust observability, and hardware lifecycle optimization will continue to serve as the critical success criterion.

Moving Beyond VMware

While VMware remains a widely used hypervisor platform, it often lacks the robust operational capabilities now demanded by modern IT teams. VergeOS provides a compelling VMware alternative, enhancing operational agility, infrastructure observability, hardware longevity, and ensuring the infrastructure software chosen fully supports these strategic priorities.

For organizations evaluating their hypervisor strategy, it’s essential to consider these operational performance metrics carefully. Storage Switzerland recently highlighted crucial factors in their Critical Capabilities for Service Providers Evaluating VMware Alternatives, reinforcing the need for comprehensive operational excellence rather than mere cost reductions.

See VergeOS Operational Performance in Action

Interested in seeing how improving IT operational performance is made possible with VergeOS? Explore our on-demand demonstration to understand how VergeOS practically transforms IT operational performance. This session showcases VergeOS’s automation and observability capabilities, providing tangible insights into how your organization can exceed traditional operational benchmarks.

Register for the on-demand demo here.

Filed Under: Virtualization Tagged With:

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Infrastructure strategies for service providers are unique depending on whether they are Managed Service Providers (MSPs) or Cloud Service Providers (CSPs). Each organization type faces unique challenges in meeting evolving customer needs. Though their business models and approaches differ, MSPs and CSPs increasingly need solutions that streamline operational complexity, enable scalability, and reduce infrastructure costs.

VergeIO’s unified virtualization platform, VergeOS, addresses these challenges by consolidating hypervisor, storage, and networking into a single software-defined environment. However, MSPs and CSPs often leverage VergeOS fundamentally differently, reflecting the distinctions in their business approaches, infrastructure management, and customer engagement models.

Infrastructure strategies for Managed Service Providers

Managed Service Providers traditionally deliver IT support services across customer-owned, on-premises environments. Their value lies in managing and optimizing hardware and software deployed within client facilities, advising on infrastructure decisions, and ensuring continuous uptime and reliability.

With VergeOS, MSPs can significantly streamline these operations. VergeOS allows MSPs to deploy a unified virtualization and storage environment directly onto their customers’ existing hardware. One of the key infrastructure strategies for service providers is remote management of on-premises customers. Rather than juggling multiple vendors and tools, MSPs can centrally manage these customer installations via VergeIO’s Site Manager dashboard. This centralized management drastically reduces complexity and enhances operational efficiency by allowing remote monitoring, updates, and troubleshooting across multiple customer environments from one interface.

Infrastructure Strategies for Service Providers

Additionally, VergeOS provides native integrated data protection, snapshotting, and replication capabilities. MSPs can effortlessly implement disaster recovery solutions by replicating customer workloads to MSP-owned infrastructure, transforming traditional reactive support models into proactive managed services. With VergeOS’s rapid and seamless migration tools, MSPs can efficiently onboard new clients or transition existing customers away from traditional virtualization platforms like VMware or Hyper-V, ensuring minimal downtime and disruption during the cutover process.

VergeOS provides MSPs with a path toward growth, allowing them to incrementally expand their services from simple infrastructure management to more advanced offerings like Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) and hybrid cloud hosting.

Infrastructure strategies for Cloud Service Providers

Cloud Service Providers, by contrast, typically host customer environments in their entirety within CSP-owned data centers. Infrastructure strategies for service providers like these require robust multi-tenancy capabilities to isolate customer environments, provide elastic scalability, and efficiently manage shared hardware resources. VergeOS addresses these challenges by delivering advanced Virtual Data Center (VDC) functionality to support complex multi-tenant architectures.

Infrastructure Strategies for Service Providers

With VergeOS, CSPs can provide fully isolated virtual data centers for each customer, complete with dedicated computing, storage, and networking resources. This architecture ensures that performance is predictable and secure, eliminating concerns around resource contention (“noisy neighbor” problems). Furthermore, CSPs can enable nested multi-tenancy, allowing their customers to subdivide their environments for departments, individual workloads, or even end-user groups. This capability makes VergeOS particularly appealing for CSPs serving large enterprises, government agencies, or software vendors needing flexible tenant management.

CSPs also benefit from VergeOS’s built-in high-availability features, such as distributed mirroring and automated self-healing. These features provide resilient infrastructure without expensive external SANs or complex clustering solutions, allowing CSPs to confidently deliver robust SLAs for critical workloads.

Moreover, CSPs can easily provision and manage resources such as CPUs and GPUs on demand, allowing customers to run performance-intensive applications, including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), high-performance computing (HPC), and analytics workloads directly within their hosted infrastructure. This flexibility positions CSPs to capitalize on emerging high-margin markets.

Comparing VergeIO Infrastructure Strategies for Service Providers

While MSPs and CSPs utilize VergeOS’s robust feature set differently, each finds unique advantages suited to their operational models. The table below summarizes these distinctions clearly:

Technical FeatureMSP ImplementationCSP Implementation
Deployment ModelCustomer-owned on-premises hardware managed remotelyCSP-owned infrastructure fully hosted
Management ModelCentralized management via Site ManagerMulti-tenant management with dedicated VDCs
Data Protection & DRRemote snapshots and DR replication to MSP datacenterIntegrated multi-tenant DRaaS, snapshot isolation, and Replication between CSP data centers.
Resource AllocationFixed resource sizing per customer siteElastic resource pooling across tenants
Multi-Tenancy CapabilityModerate, customer-level isolationAdvanced, nested multi-tenancy for complex tenant scenarios
GPU & AI WorkloadsLimited due to on-prem constraintsScalable GPU resource sharing and management
Operational ComplexitySimplified, standardized deploymentsCentralized control with advanced multi-tenancy management

Customer Example: Livewire is a CSP for MSPs

For MSPs looking to move beyond offering solely on-premises services, VergeOS customer Livewire is a cloud service provider dedicated to MSPs, enabling them to take the next step. Livewire offers a comprehensive private cloud solution to maximize profitability and remove operational friction. For Livewire, VergeOS provided the critical capabilities they needed in a VMware alternative.

Infrastructure Strategies for Service Providers

Livewire’s adoption of VergeOS allowed them to provide their MSP customers an alternative to VMware to reduce operational complexity, lower licensing costs, and drastically improve the flexibility of services offered to their end-customers. Read Livewire’s Press Release for more details.

One Platform, Two Pathways for Growth

The strength of VergeOS lies in its flexibility. MSPs benefit by streamlining existing operations, improving service delivery efficiency, and gradually expanding their service offerings. CSPs, meanwhile, leverage VergeOS to deliver advanced, scalable multi-tenant clouds capable of hosting diverse, resource-intensive workloads. Both provider types realize significant cost savings, operational simplification, and service innovation with VergeOS.

MSPs can progressively transition toward offering CSP-like services, using VergeOS as a stable foundation to support incremental growth. Meanwhile, CSPs can confidently expand their multi-tenant capabilities, differentiating themselves in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

See VergeOS for MSPs and CSPs in Action

To see VergeOS performance in action and learn how it supports both MSP and CSP use cases, we invite you to watch our latest ioMetrics webinar—now available on demand. The demo-only session shows how VergeOS delivers observability and automation from a single platform, making it ideal for multi-tenant environments, DRaaS, and AI workloads.

The Bottom Line

VergeOS delivers substantial benefits for both MSPs and CSPs—streamlining management, enhancing scalability, reducing complexity, and providing a path to innovative service offerings. Whether your goal is simplifying managed IT services or building large-scale cloud infrastructure, VergeOS delivers the technology, tools, and flexibility to achieve it.

Ready to explore how VergeOS can transform your MSP or CSP operations?
Schedule a personalized VergeOS demo today

Filed Under: MSP

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35–40% cost savings, simplified migration from VMware, and scalable multi-tenancy strengthen Livewire Cloud’s value to MSPs

Ann Arbor, Michigan – April 22, 2025 — Livewire, a cloud service provider focused exclusively on enabling Managed Service Providers (MSPs), has selected VergeOS from VergeIO as its alternate virtualization solution for those not wishing to upgrade to new VMware licensing. VergeOS is a private cloud environment tailored to the operational needs of its MSP partners.

As a cloud service provider (CSP) purpose-built to serve MSPs, Livewire chose VergeIO because it offers an integrated platform that combines virtualization, storage, and networking into a single software-defined codebase. This consolidation removes the complexity and unpredictability of VMware’s multi-product architecture—particularly relevant after the Broadcom acquisition, which introduced new licensing models, contract structures, and provider uncertainty.

“Our goal wasn’t just to cut costs—it was to future-proof our cloud offering for the MSP channel,” said Cliff Greenberg – CEO, of Livewire. “VergeOS gives us a platform that is operationally simpler, financially sustainable, and far more aligned with the needs of today’s service providers.”

Livewire began evaluating alternatives as the VMware exit trend accelerated across the service provider ecosystem. Many of its MSP partners struggled with escalating VMware licensing fees, complex upgrade dependencies, and hardware constraints—making it challenging to scale profitably or meet client expectations.

VergeOS offered Livewire a smooth transition path with native migration tooling, an intuitive interface familiar to VMware users, and compatibility with existing infrastructure. VergeIO’s support ecosystem was critical in the transition, providing guided proof-of-concept deployments, hands-on migration services, and 24×7 engineering assistance.

“We were able to deploy VergeOS alongside our VMware environment and migrate tenants gradually—on our timeline and without disruption,” said Greenberg. “The VergeIO team worked closely with us at every step.”

The shift to VergeOS allows Livewire to consolidate infrastructure and simplify operations across its entire cloud footprint. Key benefits include:

  • 35–40% reduction in infrastructure costs
    By transitioning to VergeOS’ flat, per-server licensing model, Livewire eliminated costly VMware per-core and add-on product fees. The integrated storage and networking capabilities also removed the need for vSAN, NSX, and external RAID systems. This reduced hardware requirements, power consumption, and management overhead, creating immediate and recurring cost savings across the environment.
  • Integrated, policy-driven multi-tenancy with VDC isolation
    VergeOS enables Livewire to provision fully isolated Virtual Data Centers (VDCs) for each MSP tenant, complete with dedicated virtual networking, compute, and storage resources. Role-based access control and nested VDC capabilities allow Livewire to delegate administration securely while enforcing strict resource boundaries and performance tiers—all without separate clusters or hardware silos.
  • Built-in support for tiered storage, GPU workloads, disaster recovery, and VDI
    VergeOS natively supports multiple storage tiers and live workload migration between them, allowing Livewire to serve both high-performance and archival needs from a unified platform. Native GPU passthrough enables AI, rendering, and graphical workloads. Built-in snapshot-based replication supports near-instant disaster recovery across VergeOS environments.
  • Support for automation tools like Terraform and Ansible
    VergeOS exposes a RESTful API and Terraform provider modules, enabling infrastructure-as-code deployment of VDCs, virtual machines, and network configurations. Livewire also uses Ansible for automated patching, template-based provisioning, and environment updates—significantly reducing manual intervention and accelerating tenant onboarding and scaling.
  • Visibility and monitoring through Grafana integration
    VergeOS publishes detailed performance, capacity, and resource utilization metrics via Prometheus-compatible endpoints. Livewire integrates these into Grafana dashboards for real-time infrastructure and tenant health visibility, enabling proactive alerting, SLA enforcement, and capacity planning. “CSPs like Livewire are at the heart of VergeIO’s mission,” said Yan Ness, CEO of VergeIO. “We built VergeOS to deliver the efficiency and flexibility required to serve multiple tenants securely—without stacking on cost or complexity. Livewire’s success shows what’s possible when providers are empowered with the right tools.”

Livewire continues to expand its VergeOS-powered footprint while reinforcing its commitment to helping MSPs scale efficiently. Through its fully managed deployment and 24×7 support services, Livewire enables partners to adopt VergeOS confidently, avoiding the pitfalls of hyperscale lock-in or legacy virtualization bloat.

This announcement highlights VergeOS as a powerful VMware alternative for service providers optimized for multi-tenant cloud infrastructure and turnkey service delivery.

For more information on the VergeIO/Livewire VMware alternative for MSPs.

Check out https://www.verge.io/livewire/

About Livewire

Livewire is a Cloud Service Provider for MSPs that powers infrastructure for MSPs nationwide. Focusing on removing friction and maximizing profitability for its partners, Livewire offers a complete, MSP-centric private cloud designed to support modern workloads and service delivery at scale.

About VergeIO

VergeIO is the leading VMware alternative. The company provides a software-defined data center operating system that consolidates virtualization, storage, and networking into a unified platform. VergeOS dramatically reduces complexity and cost while delivering the performance and multi-tenancy of modern IT environments. Organizations worldwide rely on VergeOS to simplify infrastructure and future-proof their operations.

Media Contact
Judy Smith
JPR Communications
[email protected]
818-522-9673

Filed Under: Press Release

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A world without VMware is the bare metal dilemma. This service provider variant delivers dedicated physical servers—without virtualization layers—giving customers complete control over hardware resources, performance, and isolation, with on-demand availability for as long or as short as needed. These organizations have long struggled to balance performance and flexibility against cost control. Their customers demand the raw power of dedicated physical servers—but increasingly want the agility and convenience of virtual infrastructure layered on top. Many bare metal service providers (BMSP) relied on VMware for years to provide that virtualization layer, but times have changed.

State of the Bare Metal Service Provider

With escalating licensing costs, hardware lock-in, and support delays—especially after VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom—many BMSPs are rethinking their foundation. Customers themselves are exploring alternatives to VMware and frequently rely on their bare metal service providers for guidance and recommendations. Providers are therefore looking for a new platform not just to keep their own margins healthy and streamline operations but also to recommend a viable VMware alternative to their customers confidently. That’s where VergeOS comes in.

Bare Metal Challenge #1: Per-Core Licensing Penalizes Modern Hardware

BMSPs run high-density infrastructure to deliver better performance per watt and reduce space, power, and cooling costs. However, VMware’s per-core licensing structure punishes that efficiency. A dual-socket server with 64 cores? That’s a premium license fee—even if you use a fraction of those cores for each customer. The bare metal dilemma is whether they allow VMware licensing practices to adjust their hardware buying strategies or just pay the VMware tax.

VergeOS solves this with flat, per-server licensing. You pay the same regardless of how many cores you have. That means you can finally take full advantage of modern, high-core-count servers without being penalized at the software level. This is a differentiator for providers looking to do more with less hardware.

“With VMware, we constantly compromised on hardware to manage licensing costs. Now, with VergeOS, we buy the servers that make sense for our business, not for VMware’s licensing model.” — Jeff Hinkle, CEO of NETdepot

Bare Metal Challenge #2: Infrastructure Fragmentation Increases Complexity

VMware environments require separate components for virtualization (ESXi), storage (vSAN), and networking (NSX), each with its own licensing, support contracts, and management overhead. Add vCenter for management, and you’ll have a sprawling control plane to deliver basic services.

VergeOS unifies virtualization, storage, and networking into a single software platform. There is no need for external SANs, third-party firewalls, or expensive software-defined networking tools. It simplifies everything for BMSPs who want to reduce their management overhead and deploy faster.

“VergeOS allowed us to eliminate VMware licensing, Microsoft SQL Server licensing, and external storage arrays, dramatically simplifying operations.” — Kelley Allen, CEO, CCSI

Bare Metal Challenge #3: Hardware Compatibility Requirements Limit Flexibility

BMSPs pride themselves on being able to run a wide variety of server configurations to meet different performance tiers and customer needs. However, VMware’s restrictive Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) puts artificial limits on what you can deploy and what you can intermix. The bare metal dilemma is whether to risk repurposing older servers still functioning or having to continuously refresh with new hardware.

VergeOS runs on almost any x86 hardware. It’s designed to be lightweight and flexible, allowing you to repurpose existing hardware or test newer form factors without fear of breaking support or violating license terms. For providers looking to extend hardware lifecycles or reduce CapEx, that’s a huge win. Plus, with VergeIO’s advanced availability capabilities, BMSPs can run this older hardware configuration without risking customer outages.

Bare Metal Challenge #4: Support That Feels Like a Ticket Queue

In a 24/7 provider environment, waiting hours for a support engineer is not acceptable. Many BMSPs report increasing delays in VMware’s support responsiveness as their environment grows more complex. The bare metal dilemma is whether to build internal expertise, which is expensive, or find a product that is easier to support.

VergeIO delivers high-touch, fast-turnaround support. In customer reports, VergeIO support teams often respond to emails in under five minutes and spin up Zoom sessions within fifteen. That’s the partner BMSPs need when uptime and SLAs are on the line.

“VergeIO provides the best vendor technical support I’ve ever experienced in the industry. They helped us solve issues quickly and thoroughly, making our VMware transition seamless and secure.” — Yogi Yeager, President, BEAR Technologies

Bare Metal Challenge #5: Maintaining Isolation and Simplicity

BMSPs sometimes become Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), serving multiple customers on shared hardware. Without proper isolation, noisy neighbors, security breaches, or compliance violations are a risk. But many traditional stacks weren’t built with multi-tenant isolation in mind.

Solving the The Bare Metal Dilemma

VergeOS supports isolated Virtual Data Centers (VDCs) for each customer—even on shared physical hosts. Each VDC has virtual networking, storage, compute, and management controls. This allows BMSPs to offer secure, flexible, and self-managed tenant environments without deploying new hardware for each customer.

Bare Metal Challenge #6: Automation and Observability are Essential

Modern BMSPs must operate at scale without scaling their staff. That means automation and observability aren’t optional—they’re essential.

Solving the The Bare Metal Dilemma

VergeOS integrates seamlessly with industry-standard tools like Terraform, Ansible, and Grafana. BMSPs can use Terraform to deploy new tenant environments as code, Ansible to manage updates and patching workflows, and Grafana dashboards powered by ioMetrics to monitor real-time infrastructure health.

This allows providers to:

  • Provision and scale customer workloads programmatically
  • Standardize deployments across environments
  • Reduce configuration drift and human error
  • Visualize usage, forecast capacity, and detect anomalies early

Join VergeIO for a live webinar, during which we will demonstrate how our Terraform provider and ioMetrics can take your infrastructure to the next level.

Bare Metal Challenge #7: Ensuring a Fast, Reliable VMware Migration

Providers and their customers want minimal disruption and risk when transitioning from VMware.

Solving The Bare Metal Dilemma

VergeIO’s ioMigrate provides rapid, low-risk migrations. It connects directly to VMware via the backup API, enabling a near-instant initial migration and thorough testing under VergeOS. Incremental updates from the production VMware environment are continuously synced to VergeOS during testing. When testing is complete, the final update and cutover typically take less than one minute, minimizing customer downtime and disruption.

Bare Metal Challenge #8: Protecting Against Ransomware

Ransomware is a top concern for BMSPs because a single customer’s compromised environment can rapidly impact others. The bare metal dilemma is whether they build another stack of software to adequately protect their environment or look for infrastructure that can defend itself.

Solving The Bare Metal Dilemma

VergeOS mitigates ransomware risks through comprehensive isolation provided by VDCs, enabling each tenant to be completely isolated from the others. ioClone provides read-only snapshots that can be taken every few minutes without impacting performance. These snapshots are unlimited and don’t impact system resources. ioFortify complements this by offering early notifications of ransomware attacks, detecting suspicious activity within minutes, and enabling rapid recovery.

The Financial Impact: Real-World Savings

Providers making the switch to VergeOS consistently report significant cost savings:

  • NETdepot: Approximately 80% reduction in infrastructure software costs due to VergeOS’s flat licensing model and dense server utilization.
  • CCSI: Significant reductions in licensing and infrastructure costs, reducing per-desktop expenses dramatically by eliminating VMware, Microsoft SQL Server, and external storage licensing.

“We’ve lowered our cost per virtual desktop dramatically.” — Kelley Allen, CEO, CCSI

The Bottom Line

The bare metal dilemma is how to address their unique requirements when considering a VMware alternative while dealing with mounting pressure from customers who want the performance of metal and the convenience of virtualization without the complexity or cost. VMware once helped bridge that gap, but it’s no longer aligned with provider economics.

VergeOS is purpose-built to empower BMSPs. It delivers a unified, cost-efficient, and flexible platform that simplifies operations and unlocks profitability. Whether transitioning off VMware or designing a new infrastructure stack from scratch, VergeOS gives you the foundation to compete—and win—in a rapidly changing market.

ioMetrics is now available on GitHub Releases, complete with full documentation and setup instructions.

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